Discipleship is a life-long journey to becoming more like Jesus Christ.
What is a disciple? During His short life walking the earth, Jesus called twelve men to follow Him. To witness His miracles, hear His teaching and most importantly live life with Him for those brief intense years. Today Jesus is still calling people to be His disciples and amazingly to participate in showing God's love and mercy to the world, just the same as He with those first few followers. Our starting point for understanding discipleship is Jesus – his life, conduct, and teaching. Jesus is the source, substance and goal of true discipleship.
Here you will find resources on lifetime journey of being a disciple of Jesus.
How do disciple-makers model themselves after Jesus, and how do disciples identify with the first disciples? Here are four ways we can learn from Jesus and the Twelve for making disciples.
How to present the gospel to the Québécois without unnecessary religious trappings that can hide the beauty and the winsomeness of the love of God revealed in Christ.
What does the church look like when no one is attending? Do we identify the church by the location, facility, staff, programs, and services? If our understanding of the church is tied to these things, then the church may be facing a major crisis right now.
When we take public gatherings and large worship services out of the equation, we still have the people of God, scattered in society where they can be the church.
Being a witness to something extraordinary is nothing new. We witness the ordinary and extraordinary events taking place around us every day. Being a witness is normal. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to be witnesses to the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Do you ever feel like me? I know what I am supposed to do, but sometimes I feel guilty for not doing it well. I suggest that most often, when we feel like we have failed, it is because we do not know where to start. Witnessing doesn’t have to be hard, here are a few suggestions we can consider.
Disciple-Making Groups can be trained to function as small churches and can reproduce themselves more easily than large churches. Here's a simple template for how to run a Disciple-Making Group.
Growing up, I watched a lot of crime dramas and police shows and these days there are more of them than ever.
Whether they are trying to be funny or serious there is always a constant theme when trying to solve a crime: Finding a witness, or better yet multiple witnesses, and determining whether their accounts match up with each other and make sense with the physical evidence.
Some of the most effective witnesses I've seen have surprised me. They don't look like what I imagine. They aren't necessarily well-educated, or financially stable, or well-established in society.
I've had the opportunity to work alongside some very fruitful witnesses, those who have seen many people choose to follow Jesus Christ, as the Holy Spirit empowered their efforts. Here's some things I've learned from watching them...
The early believers experienced the full scope of the Spirit’s working and speaking. This sensitivity to the Spirit was made possible through their steady commitment to worship and listening prayer.
Exploring the prompting of the Holy Spirit - in the early church & in our current neighbourhoods.
What is the role of prayer as we look to share our faith with others?
I confess my tendency when presented with the opportunity to speak out as a witness, is to immediately consider possible consequences for engaging in the witness role. Sometimes I engage the opportunity. Sometimes I hit the mental pause button and continue on pause until the opportunity is no longer there.